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“As for me I will always have hope; I will praise you more and more.” Ps 71:14

Yesterday, as I listened to the news reports it was hard not to feel deeply saddened. Tragic reports of the bombing in Baghdad and the riots in Brussels as a backlash to the recent atrocities there. Then the local news; a shop keeper stabbed and trampled to death in Shawlands and a young women murdered in Clydebank. It was hard not to feel overwhelmed.

Often I have read over this quote by the journalist Malcom Muggeridge. Writing in 1980: We look back upon history and what do we see? Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counterrevolutions, wealth accumulating and and then disbursed, one nation dominant and then another. Shakespeare speaks of the “rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.”

In one lifetime I have seen my owncountrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, the great majority of them convinced, in the words of what is still a favorite song, that “God who’s made them mighty would make them mightier yet.”

I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian proclaim to the world the establishment of a German Reich that would last for a thousand years; an Italian clown announce he would restart the calendar to begin with his own assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the western world as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Asoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius.

I’ve seen America wealthier and in terms of military weaponry more powerful than all the rest of the world put together, so that Americans, had they so wished, could have outdone an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of their conquests.

All in one little lifetime. All gone with the wind.

England now part of an island off the coast of Europe and threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead and remembered only in infamy.Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped to found and dominate for some three decades.

America haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps the motorways roaring and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam and of the great victories of the Don Quixotes of the media when they charged the windmills of Watergate. All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.

When Ravi Zacharias quotes a version of these memorable words from Muggeridge, he often adds his own appropriate postscript:

Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace: The person of Jesus Christ. I present him as the way, the truth, and the life.

No lie can endure. Only the truth remains. Nations, powers and corporations will rise and fall in their time. We will see much advance and much wickedness played out on the world stage. Yet, nothing happens in vain and nothing is waste. All is in the Sovereign hand of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Who came as promised, to bring complete reconciliation between man and His creator and He will come again, to bring complete restoration to all things.

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Man as man, with all his material not fashioned by anything in the image of anythinghas a tragic lot; trapped in a sham state of things.David stands as an image of something.If mortal man simply stands…If what we call true man be not an imagepity him.

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The Duke of Wellington

“The single most embarrassing thing about the culture of Glasgow has been the cone on the Duke’s head. It is detestable.’

But a petition set up by campaigners argued: ‘The cone on Wellington’s head is an iconic part of Glasgow’s heritage, and means far more to the people of Glasgow and to visitors than Wellington himself ever has.’ The statue stands in front of the city’s Gallery of Modern Art in one of the most important public squares in Glasgow. Around the early 1980s, pranksters – often including drunk students – began vandalising the statue by placing traffic cones on its heads. The practice has become iconic in some quarters, and in 2011 was named one of the ‘top 10 most bizarre monuments on Earth’ by the Lonely Planet guidebook. While the city council has urged residents to avoid damaging the historic monument, some regard the practical joke as evidence of the city’s unique sense of humour. After the petition attracted 10,000 signatures, with another 45,000 people showing support on Facebook, the council announced that the plans were being withdrawn” The Daily Mail

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Glasgow’s Coat of Arms

Here is the bird that never flew
Here is the tree that never grew
Here is the bell that never rang
Here is the fish that never swam